Distributional Aspects of Energy and Climate Policies

Governments around the globe have begun to implement various actions to limit carbon emissions in order to combat climate change. This book brings together some of the leading scholars in environmental and climate economics to examine the distributional consequences of policies designed to reduce these carbon emissions. Whether through a carbon tax, cap-and-trade system, or other mechanisms, most proposals to reduce carbon emissions include some kind of carbon pricing system - shifting the costs of emissions onto polluters and providing an incentive to find the least cost methods of abatement. This standard efficiency justification for pricing carbon also has important distributional consequences - a problem that is often ignored by economists while being a major focus of attention in the political arena. Leading scholars in environmental and climate economics take up these issues to examine such questions as: Will the costs fall on current or future generations? Will they fall on the rich, poor, middle class, or on everyone proportionally? Which countries will benefit, and which will suffer? Students and scholars interested in climate change along with policy makers will find this lively volume an invaluable addition to the quest for information on this globally important issue.